Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends
corrupt power to knot and gender in; you volunteer your services to
people of quality to ease scruples of mind and qualms of conscience;
you lay the flattering unction of venal prose and laurell'd verse to
their souls. You persuade them that there is neither purity of
morals, nor depth of understanding except in themselves and their
hangers-on; and would prevent the unhallow'd names of Liberty and
humanity from ever being whispered in ears polite! You, sir, do you
not all this? I cry you mercy then: I took you for the Editor of the
Quarterly Review."
This is the sort of feu de joie he keeps up. There is another extract or
two--one especially which I will copy to-morrow--for the candles are burnt
down and I am using the wax taper--which has a long snuff on it--the fire
is at its last click--I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather
askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the
carpet--I am writing this on the Maid's Tragedy, which I have read since
tea with great pleasure--Besides this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher,
there are on the table two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom
Moore's, called Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress--nothing in it. These are
trifles--but I require nothing so much of you but that you will give one a
like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to
me. Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it
would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakspeare sat when
he began "To be or not to be"--such things become interesting from
distance of time or place. I hope you are both now in that sweet sleep
which no two beings deserve more than you do--I must fancy so--and please
myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your
lives--God bless you--I whisper good-night in your ears, and you will
dream of me.
March 13, Saturday.
I have written to Fanny this morning and received a note from Haslam. I
was to have dined with him to-morrow: he gives me a bad account of his
Father, who has not been in Town for five weeks, and is not well enough
for company. Haslam is well--and from the prosperous state of some love
affair he does not mind the double tides he has to work. I have been a
Walk past west end--and was going to call at Mr. Monkhouse's--but I did
not, not being in the humour. I know not why Poetry and I have been so
distant lately; I must make some advances soon or she will cut me
entirely. Hazlitt has this fine Passage in his Letter: Gifford in his
Review of Hazlitt's characters of Shakspeare's plays attacks the
Coriolanus critique. He says that Hazlitt has slandered Shakspeare in
saying that he had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question.
Hazlitt thus defends himself,
"My words are, 'Coriolanus is a storehouse of political commonplaces.
The Arguments for and against aristocracy and democracy on the
Privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on Liberty and
slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably
handled, with the spirit of a Poet and the acuteness of a
Philosopher. Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the
arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt
for his own origin, and to have spared no occasion of bating the
rabble. What he says of them is very true; what he says of their
betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it.' I then
proceed to account for this by showing how it is that 'the cause of
the people is but little calculated for a subject for poetry; or that
the language of Poetry naturally falls in with the language of
power.' I affirm, Sir, that Poetry, that the imagination generally
speaking, delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in
truth, in good, in right, whereas pure reason and the moral sense
approve only of the true and good. I proceed to show that this
general love or tendency to immediate excitement or theatrical
effect, no matter how produced, gives a Bias to the imagination often
consistent with the greatest good, that in Poetry it triumphs over
principle, and bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common
humanity. You say that it does not, that there is no such original
Sin in Poetry, that it makes no such sacrifice or unworthy compromise
between poetical effect and the still small voice of reason. And how
do you prove that there is no such principle giving a bias to the
imagination and a false colouring to poetry? Why, by asking in reply
to the instances where this principle operates, and where no other
can with much modesty and simplicity--'But are these the only topics
that afford delight in Poetry, etc.?' No; but these objects do afford
delight in poetry, and they afford it in proportion to their strong
and often tragical effect, and not in proportion to the good
produced, or their desireableness in a moral point of view. Do we
read with more pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey than of the
Shepherd's pipe upon the Mountain? No; but we do read with pleasure
of the ravages of a beast of prey, and we do so on the principle I
have stated, namely, from the sense of power abstracted from the
sense of good; and it is the same principle that makes us read with
admiration and reconciles us in fact to the triumphant progress of
the conquerors and mighty Hunters of mankind, who come to stop the
Shepherd's Pipe upon the Mountains and sweep away his listening
flock. Do you mean to deny that there is anything imposing to the
imagination in power, in grandeur, in outward show, in the
accumulation of individual wealth and luxury, at the expense of equal
justice and the common weal? Do you deny that there is anything in
the 'Pride, Pomp, and Circumstance of glorious war, that makes
ambition virtue' in the eyes of admiring multitudes? Is this a new
theory of the pleasures of the imagination, which says that the
pleasures of the imagination do not take rise solely in the
calculation of the understanding? Is it a paradox of my creating that
'one murder makes a villain millions a Hero'? or is it not true that
here, as in other cases, the enormity of the evil overpowers and
makes a convert of the imagination by its very magnitude? You
contradict my reasoning because you know nothing of the question, and
you think that no one has a right to understand what you do not. My
offence against purity in the passage alluded to, 'which contains the
concentrated venom of my malignity,' is that I have admitted that
there are tyrants and slaves abroad in the world; and you would hush
the matter up and pretend that there is no such thing in order that
there may be nothing else. Further, I have explained the cause, the
subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the
evil in order to guard against its approaches; you would conceal the
cause in order to prevent the cure, and to leave the proud flesh
about the heart to harden and ossify into one impenetrable mass of
selfishness and hypocrisy, that we may not 'sympathise in the
distresses of suffering virtue' in any case in which they come in
competition with the fictitious wants and 'imputed weaknesses of the
great.' You ask, 'Are we gratified by the cruelties of Domitian or
Nero?' No, not we--they were too petty and cowardly to strike the
imagination at a distance; but the Roman senate tolerated them,
addressed their perpetrators, exalted them into gods, the fathers of
the people, they had pimps and scribblers of all sorts in their pay,
their Senecas, etc., till a turbulent rabble, thinking there were no
injuries to Society greater than the endurance of unlimited and
wanton oppression, put an end to the farce and abated the sin as well
as they could. Had you and I lived in those times we should have been
what we are now, I 'a sour malcontent,' and you 'a sweet courtier.'"
The manner in which this is managed: the force and innate power with which
it yeasts and works up itself--the feeling for the costume of society; is
in a style of genius. He hath a demon, as he himself says of Lord Byron.
We are to have a party this evening. The Davenports from Church Row--I
don't think you know anything of them--they have paid me a good deal of
attention. I like Davenport himself. The names of the rest are Miss
Barnes, Miss Winter with the Children.
[Later, March 17 or 18.]
On Monday we had to dinner Severn and Cawthorn, the Bookseller and
print-virtuoso; in the evening Severn went home to paint, and we other
three went to the play, to see Sheil's new tragedy ycleped Evadne. In the
morning Severn and I took a turn round the Museum--There is a Sphinx there
of a giant size, and most voluptuous Egyptian expression, I had not seen
it before. The play was bad even in comparison with 1818, the Augustan age
of the Drama, "comme on sait," as Voltaire says--the whole was made up of
a virtuous young woman, an indignant brother, a suspecting lover, a
libertine prince, a gratuitous villain, a street in Naples, a Cypress
grove, lilies and roses, virtue and vice, a bloody sword, a spangled
jacket, one Lady Olivia, one Miss O'Neil alias Evadne, alias Bellamira,
alias--Alias--Yea, and I say unto you a greater than Elias--There was
Abbot, and talking of Abbot his name puts me in mind of a spelling-book
lesson, descriptive of the whole Dramatis personae--Abbot--Abbess--Actor--
Actress--The play is a fine amusement, as a friend of mine once said to
me--"Do what you will," says he, "a poor gentleman who wants a guinea,
cannot spend his two shillings better than at the playhouse." The
pantomime was excellent, I had seen it before and I enjoyed it again. Your
Mother and I had some talk about Miss H.---- Says I, will Henry have that
Miss ----, a lath with a boddice, she who has been fine drawn--fit for
nothing but to cut up into Cribbage pins, to the tune of 15.2; one who is
all muslin; all feathers and bone; once in travelling she was made use of
as a lynch pin; I hope he will not have her, though it is no uncommon
thing to be _smitten with a staff_; though she might be very useful as his
walking-stick, his fishing-rod, his tooth-pik, his hat-stick (she runs so
much in his head)--let him turn farmer, she would cut into hurdles; let
him write poetry, she would be his turn-style. Her gown is like a flag on
a pole; she would do for him if he turn freemason; I hope she will prove a
flag of truce; when she sits languishing with her one foot on a stool, and
one elbow on the table, and her head inclined, she looks like the sign of
the crooked billet--or the frontispiece to Cinderella, or a tea-paper
wood-cut of Mother Shipton at her studies; she is a make-believe--She is
bona _s_ide a thin young 'oman--But this is mere talk of a
fellow-creature; yet pardie I would not that Henry have her--Non volo ut
eam possideat, nam, for, it would be a bam, for it would be a sham--
Don't think I am writing a petition to the Governors of St. Luke--no, that
would be in another style. May it please your Worships; forasmuch as the
undersigned has committed, transferred, given up, made over, consigned,
and aberrated himself, to the art and mystery of poetry; forasmuch as he
hath cut, rebuffed, affronted, huffed, and shirked, and taken stint at,
all other employments, arts, mysteries, and occupations, honest, middling,
and dishonest; forasmuch as he hath at sundry times and in divers places,